Author Anthony Horowitz says he was "warned off" including a black character in his new book because it was "inappropriate" for a white writer.
The creator of the Alex Rider teenage spy novels says an editor told him it could be considered "patronising".
Horowitz wanted a white and black protagonist in his new children's books but says he is now reconsidering.
"I will have to think about whether this character can be black or white," he told the Mail on Sunday.
"I have for a long, long time said that there aren't enough books around for every ethnicity."
Horowitz, who has written 10 novels featuring teenage spy Alex Rider, said there was a "chain of thought" in America that it was "inappropriate" for white writers to try to create black characters, something which he described as "dangerous territory".
He said it was considered "artificial and possibly patronising" to do so because "it is actually not our experience".
"Therefore I was warned off doing it. Which was, I thought, disturbing and upsetting."
Horowitz, who has written a new James Bond book, went on jokingly to say: "Taking it to the extreme, all my characters will from now be 62-year-old white Jewish men living in London."